A One Week Training Program at the South African Revenue Service (14-18 Nov 2011)

I am sorry that i have not penned anything for so long. Let me write about my experiences here at the SARS.

The one week attachment here in the Maxwell Megawatt Park has been an exceptionally great learning experience. Insights into almost all aspects of tax administration here at the SARS have been provided in the small span of four days and this surely reflects the amount of effort that the organizers Ms. Seboya Mogoba and Mr. Brandley Ngcobo from SARS International have put up under the coordination of Ms. Varsha Singh, Head of SARS International.



The sessions started with the history of SARS by Mr. Aiden Keanly, a very senior officer here at the SARS. This lecture set the context for the sessions that followed, covering aspects from tax legislation to tax administration. One key feature that was conspicuous was the vision and mission of SARS along with its mandate to modernize and reform itself continuously. Mr. Franz Tomasek, a senior SARS official who spoke on “Tax Law and Administration” pointed out that there are many different ideas that can be implemented to modernize SARS but what is vital is to prioritize and focus on four-five ideas rather than seeking up to implement all the ideas. Mr. Jerome Frey on the lecure on “Business Systems and Modernization” revealed SARS phased strategy to modernize itself in a span of seven years. This phased strategy has merits over sudden impulsive steps to change the procedures and processes of the tax administration given the fact that tax environment is itself very complicated and feedback of taxpayers and other stakeholders also need to be taken into account. These messages hold a lot of importance in the Indian context as well and there is surely a lot to learn from the way SARS has given a professional touch to tax administration, which is very unlikely a bureaucratic setup, even here at South Africa.



The highpoint for me during the attachment was a visit to the Computer Forensics Lab at the Large Business Center here at the SARS. We were shown demonstrations on how to make a read-only image of a seized hard disk, to retrieve and analyze the deleted data from a hard disk, to decrypt the files, to analyze the files whose file types have been modified, to make an image of all the data (call details, SMS, MMS, emails, photos, movies, contacts) from a smartphone, to retrieve the information on a credit/debit card etc. The Q&A session was very long and Mr. Arvind Maharaj and the five members working under him at the Computer Forensics were extremely patient to answer our queries.



There are definitely so many lessons to be learnt from SARS. The way in which modernization has been taken up in a phased and structured manner is worth emulating. The efforts of SARS in the field of tax education also are commendable. In this regard, we need to take cues from their practice of keeping the various brochures, pamphlets and similar educational material at all the libraries, national parks, malls and other public places so as to reach to the taxpayers. It was encouraging to listen to their future steps on spreading financial literacy by setting up stalls at the various malls and to include a cartoon-based chapter in the textbooks for school-children.


All in all, I am honored to be here at this training program and sincerely hope that all of us do justice to the huge amount of investment that has been done on us to send the entire delegation to South Africa. There are miles to go before we sleep !!!